Elizabeth B. Crist

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Elizabeth B. Crist | "Ye Sons of Harmony": Politics, Masculinity, and the Music of William Billings in Revolutionary Boston | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.2 | The History Cooperative

Notes and Documents

"Ye Sons of Harmony": Politics, Masculinity, and the Music of William Billings in Revolutionary Boston

THE first American-born composers appeared in the northern colonies during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Generally working as itinerant music teachers, these men wrote choral pieces for use by students, congregations at worship services, and amateur singers at social meetings. Their music was printed in compilations known as tunebooks, which usually included works by a variety of composers as well as a didactic preface on musical rudiments. ¹ Pride of place among this generation of native composers belongs to William Billings (1746–1800), whose six tunebooks contain more than 340 original compositions—an unprecedented American creative achievement. ²	1
Scholarship has accurately placed Billings in the musical tradition of psalmody and the general cultural milieu of revolutionary Boston, but the composer has yet to be fully considered in the specific context of colonial republicanism and masculine self-fashioning. Interpreting Billings with reference to politics and gender yields a new perspective on this familiar figure and situates his work in the larger sociocultural discourse of masculinity. In his words and music Billings links the male-dominated sphere of politics to a masculinist conception of creativity, invoking such ideals as self-sufficiency, individual agency, and fame. In the gendered social and political culture of late eighteenth-century Boston, Billings promoted himself through authorship, political engagement, and the rhetoric of masculinity.³	2
Born in 1746 to a Boston storekeeper, Billings received an elementary education before his apprenticeship to a tanner.⁴ Apparently he acquired basic musical skills in local singing schools and, in 1769, began to lead such schools himself while still working in his leather shop. In 1770, Billings published his first tunebook, the New-England Psalm-Singer, which was also the first book of entirely American pieces and the first to feature the works of a single composer. Its 127 tunes multiplied the number of previously known American compositions by at least three.⁵ David McKay and Richard Crawford, Billings's usually sober biographers, note of New-England Psalm-Singer that "it would be difficult to find another single publication in the history of American music—in the history of western music, for that matter—whose priority in its tradition is more conspicuous than that of Billings's collection."⁶	. . .

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